AN EXCHANGE OF LETTERS
There is, I know, a humbling consolation of a strange kind in
the knowledge that to other people I am an undistinguishable part
of a herd too. Statistically, my name goes into hundreds of categories
and I crop up in every column of the human ledger. I find pleasure,
even freedom from responsibility, in the common warmth. But when
I go to my room and start writing, my repugnancies rise again, and
I split into several frames of mind.
If
anyone asks me what
is
my
relation, not as a private person but as an imaginative writer to the
herds, to society which nowadays has come to mean the whole world
-I am bewildered. Not because I haven't one or two slick answers
ready to questions like that; but because I have noticed that my
opinion appears to differ from my practice. It is natural for an
Englishman to be hypocritical; the climate calls for the blur and
stimulus of hypocrisy as it calls for alcohol. I am quite capable of
saying that it
is
the duty of the writer to preach the just handling of
these herds, to plunge with a great splash into the great social and
political agonies of our time; and then I will sit down and write
novels or stories which show no sign of doing that kind of thing.
There is a difference between the believing and the imagining self.
When I
am
asked to preach my sermon, I take one discreet step back–
wards before taking two improvident steps forward. I am astonished
at being asked. What on earth do I know about it all? And I resent,
too, the attempt to trade on my baser nature which really requires
so little encouragement to ascend into the stale regions of "blah,"
which longs to utter a word which someone will hang on. Oh, to be
admitted to "conversations at high level!" Is there, in every imagin–
ative writer, an imperialist, expansionist group, urging
him
to expand
beyond the native frontiers of
his
knowledge and capacity. I hope so,
because I hope I'm not the only one; but what fools writers make of
themselves in public life. When I was asked some weeks ago what
was the imaginative writer's attitude to "the challenge of our time"–
as
if
I could speak for anyone but myself-these feelings muddle me.
I have no doubt it
is
an interesting question. But
it
may not be an
important one. I notice that I am less of a Hotspur and more of a
Falstaff every time I get a challenge. I fancy the imaginative writer
must avoid the terms of the publicist like the devil. I know that some–
not many,
if
you look it up-that some imaginative writers have been
excellent pamphleteers. In Lichfield, George Fox did not hesitate to
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